5 Yuan Farmers Bank of China

The Farmers Bank of China was established in 1933 under the Nationalist government primarily to address rural credit — a chronic structural problem that older commercial banks had no interest in solving. By 1935, the bank had been absorbed into the broader currency reform pushed through by T.V. Soong and H.H. Kung, which unified China's paper currency and took the country off silver. This note is a direct product of that reform: the Farmers Bank became one of four institutions authorized to issue fabi, the new legal tender.

De La Rue's London production gave the series a level of technical security that domestic Chinese printing could not match at the time, with the watermarked cotton stock being a deliberate anti-counterfeiting measure in a period when forgery of Chinese notes was rampant.